On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, Alan B. Pearce wrote:

> The bit that scares me most about this is that the powers that be have these
> pictures of such out of the way places before the tsunami struck. What for?

The powers that be knew from one to five hours in advance what was going 
to happen because their global quake (and nuke) monitoring system had 
ruled out a nuke as at most 20 minutes after the quake, the groundwave 
reached their stations, and very likely some cameras on certain 
satellites were automatically pointed towards the triangulated epicenter 
before people knew what was up.

What is amazing me is, how come a civilian firm had the cameras pointed 
the right way. One explanation would be that they are hooked into the 
disaster warning network (geological in this case) and did their own 
math quickly enough to catch the tsunami (they had between one and five 
hours time - probably one hour for the pictures shown), knowing where 
their satellite was at the time, so they chose the place that could be 
imaged best at the time. I think that the photo 'window' for a leo 
satellite is less than 10 minutes per orbit, maybe less than 5 for a 
fixed place (a complete orbit is ~90 minutes for leo). I think that the 
pictures shown were shot on successive orbits. Maybe it was a 
coincidence (someone had ordered pictures from that area ?). I don't 
know much about the subject but I do not believe in coincidences.

The general area of where the earthquake happened is near where Krakatoa 
went off (and also caused tsunamis).

Peter
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